Introduction

FFmpeg is the universal multimedia toolkit: a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert, filter, and stream audio and video. It is used by a number of media players (including VLC and MPlayer), video websites (including YouTube and Vimeo), web browsers (including Google Chrome/Chromium and Firefox), social media (including Facebook and Twitter) and countless other software projects in the multimedia field and beyond.

Information for Students

Getting Started

Get to know FFmpeg. If you are a student interested in contributing to FFmpeg, it is recommended to start by subscribing to the ​ffmpeg-devel mailing-list, visiting our FreeNode IRC channels (#ffmpeg-devel and #ffmpeg although you will find most developers on the first one), and exploring both the codebase and the development workflow. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. Also do not hesitate to answer questions from other students on our IRC channel if you know the answer to something.

Find a project. Listed on this page are mentored and un-mentored projects. Mentored projects are well-defined and mentor(s) have already volunteered. Un-mentored projects are additional ideas you may want to consider, but you will have to contact us to find a mentor. You can also propose your own project, if you can think of one that better fits your interest and skill level. If a project description is unclear or you have any questions, please get in touch with its mentor and/or join our IRC channel at #ffmpeg-devel.

Contact us. If you decide on a project, get in touch with the community and let us know. If you want to work on a qualification task, let the respective mentor know so we can avoid duplicated efforts.

Apply. Students should apply by April 3 at the very latest. The "work" period begins on May 30 and ends in August. Take a look at ​GSoC timeline for additional information. Note, make sure you apply to Google before the 3rd even if you have not yet finished your qualification task. And please apply as soon as possible: Applications can be improved until the 3rd but not afterwards!

Note: A friendly reminder that while the application to GSoC is important for you and GSoC, FFmpeg mentors will not base their decision solely on the GSoC application. We will judge the applicant based on their abilities in coding, learning the tools, communication skills etc. So please do not worry about your application being perfect for us. Although it is very important to follow GSoC's application rules so they can pay you.

Qualification Tasks

In order to get accepted you normally have to complete a small qualification task. FFmpeg development can be quite challenging and the qualification task helps us figure out whether you are motivated enough and have the potential to deliver successfully.

The qualification tasks are usually shown in the project description. Contact the respective mentor(s) for assistance on getting a related qualification task or if you want to propose your own. You can also browse the ​FFmpeg Bug Tracker for qualification task ideas. In general qualification tasks should include submitting a patch to the ​ffmpeg-devel mailing list which passes review and is accepted into the FFmpeg codebase. It will be common for such patches to need multiple iterations of submissions and reviews, so don't wait too long with the first submission! Note, please avoid picking a qualification task which another student is already working on, each student should work on a different qualification task.

Contacting FFmpeg

If you have questions or comments feel free to contact us via our mailing list, IRC channel, or e-mail one of the FFmpeg GSoC admins:

You may also contact a mentor directly if you have questions specifically related to one of the projects listed on this page.

Mentored Projects

This section lists well-defined projects that have one or more available mentors. If you are new to FFmpeg, and have relatively little experience with multimedia, you should favor a mentored project rather than propose your own. Contact the respective mentor(s) to get more information about the project and the requested qualification task.

FFA1 Codec Research

Description: Following in the footsteps of the FFv1 codec for lossless video compression, which was recently standardized and still continue to have ongoing research, the FFmpeg project has begun research on a new lossless audio codec, built upon modern technologies, with the hopes that it will be the best in the field. Research around lossless audio coding seems to have stopped in the past 10 years except for minor one-man efforts and low-resource codecs. Since then, many new techniques which help in the overall field of compression have been discovered or improved sufficiently (adaptive entropy encoding, PVQ, frequency domain intra prediction, integer DCTs, etc.). Students working on this project will help in the implementation and testing of these technologies for use in the FFA1 audio codec.

Expected results: The FFA1 reference encoder to produce the same efficiency or greater than FLAC without having much in common, while still maintaining bit-perfect reproduction by the decoder.

FITS image decoder and encoder

Description: Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy.

VMAF video filter

Description: Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion (VMAF) is an video quality metric developed (​https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf) by Netflix. The metric provides an indication of how closely a video resembles a source/reference. This is semantically similar to PSNR/SSIM, but VMAF is supposed to more closely reflect human visual perception. FFmpeg currently has video filters that measure PSNR/SSIM of any input video file compared to a reference, but it currently has no support for VMAF. In this task, you will add support for VMAF to FFmpeg.

Expected results: Fully functional video filter that measures the VMAF of any input video compared to a reference, and that does not depend on Netflix' code. You should be able to run a command like "ffmpeg -i file -i ref -lavfi vmaf -f null -" and it should give identical results to Netflix' run_vmaf.py tool. If there is time, you will also write x86 SIMD optimizations.

VP9 decoder improvements

Description: VP9 is a video codec developed by Google. It yields significantly better quality per bit compared to H.264, which is why many websites - e.g. Youtube - use VP9 (if the client supports it) to stream video over internet. FFmpeg has a native VP9 decoder that is significantly faster than Google's reference implementation. In this task, you will make this decoder even better.

Expected results: Improve FFmpeg's VP9 native decoder by implementing one or more of the following subtasks:

DICOM support

Description: FFmpeg currently does not support DICOM files although this is a widely used image format that is often passed to patients who have no access to DICOM equipment.

Expected results: Support reading as many features of the format as possible.

Prerequisites: Good C coding skills, basic familiarity with git

Qualification Task: Write a simple demuxer for a format currently unsupported by FFmpeg. The following tickets contain possible tasks, not all of them are equally simple / difficult, some may turn out to be less useful: #5154, #4748, #4519, #3986 (this may be too difficult or impossible), #3720, #2956, #2662 and #2176. Not all possible features of a demuxer have to be implemented (the more the better) but at least auto-detection and video decoding (and remuxing) should be possible to implement for all of them.

Your Own Project Idea

A student can propose a project. Ideas can also be found by browsing bugs and feature requests on our bug tracker. The work should last the majority of the GSoC internship duration, the task must be approved by the developers, and a mentor must be assigned.

Students can discuss an idea in the ffmpeg-devel mailing-list, the #ffmpeg-devel IRC channel, or contact the FFmpeg GSoC admins for more information.